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If you’re currently marketing to C-Suite executives and other senior decision makers, you already know how hard it is to generate the sort of sales pipeline that could yield six to seven figures for your organisation.

The difficulty comes in building credibility for your brand, establishing trust with the C-Suite and delivering value before ever trying to sell them anything.

In this article I want to shine some light on a huge mistake that most marketers make when connecting with senior decision makers.

It involves the positioning of your message, attachments to your brand and how being independent is the key to fixing this problem.

Before we dive into this let’s take a look at how selling to the C-Suite is different from your average sales process. The key lies in doing the exact opposite of how most selling is done.

Agility, however you want to define it, should help to speed up iteration and therefore increase profit and customer satisfaction.

The working methods agility predicates may also help to increase staff satisfaction.

It can be argued that agility is achieved through innovation: setting aside some time to focus on ideas that may not be central to the core business. At the moment, I’d argue innovation isn’t particularly widespread, as many organisations’ attitude towards it is ’70:20:that’s not what we pay you for’.

Indeed, the double whammy of the recession and many governments’ subsequent focus on ‘the need for efficiency savings’ has set a tone that makes innovation even riskier.

The fact is though, fortune favours the brave, and in times of economic hardship (darn it, I’ve slipped into bureaucratese), those that spend money adapting to a surfeit of new and relevant technologies may well see success.

But what about all those non-innovating, anti-Eric-Schmidt business leaders? They must be struggling with something. They aren’t wilfully blind. Perhaps legacy technology and the difficulty of extricating an organisation from its knotted innards is what’s holding some business leaders back.